No! I Will NOT contribute 5 Cents to that Sick Child!

30Oct08

I’m so sick of emails some people send me saying that “Please forward this e mail if you have a heart” or “Please forward this message to everyone you know” or “Please help to save a life”. They claim they are so authentic (yeah, and I’m Superman in disguise). It might be something else like “forward this 100 time and it will bring you fortune. The last one I got was named “Fwd: Pleeeeease forward …it costs nothing 2 u.”. Costs nothing?!!! It costs my patience, my nerves, my bandwidth, my time and sometime my sense also when I notice the sender is sometimes an IT student!

I won’t mind promoting a cause which I know of and I could verify, like the fund raiser to support a university student who was dying from a cancer. But all the other things which no one can verify the validity (which is the common case) are not going to pass though me.

To make it clear I’ll just say: “Those mails are hoaxes, so stop spamming!”. Give some thought on these points. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeese! 😉

1. E mail systems were never designed to track E mails.

E mail were never designed with a facility to track the emails sent. Later facilities were added to support delivery receipts and return receipts. But this is just for the servers. This means that as far as I know Microsoft, AOL or any other (unless of course they are employing Hana Gitelman) *cannot* track any emails you send.

2. There’s no reliable way I know of which can track data across the Internet

Internet had a vast number of server interconnected in some means. I guess all of you remember that basic introduction. So,… when you send a mail, that piece of data travels thought this forest of servers, through numerous nodes and so on. Some servers strip data from that, some add to that. So don’t expect that there’s a reliable technique to track e mail. So what ever some mails claim, it is not effective up to my knowledge.

3. You are helping Spammers!

I once got a chain mail which had over 2000 e mail addresses in it. Yes! over 2000. Some were wide open to read. Some were hidden in the header. However, should a spammer get his/her hand on that mail (which I’m pretty sure of) he/she will have another 2000+ e mail adresses to their database. Just imagine the number of e mail addresses passing in the Internet in pure text format!

It is believed that most of these chain mails originate from professional spammers. 🙂 And I’ve seen some locally originated stuff too. Whatever the cause may be, it’ll still be for spammers advantage.

4. You are offending/harming others

By including your friends e mail addresses in a spam mail list, you are doing a harm to them. Then you are also affecting their productivity, time, bandwidth, etc. You also expose them to phishing and other forms of scams, and also could carry malware like trojans, worms, spyware, etc. If you don’t listen to any other reason, at least stop because of this security concern. Need I say anything more? You know the pain for yourself.

5. You are harming yourself

By continuously sending chain mails, you are not only jeopardizing your friends, but also damaging your credibility and reputation.

Some of these mails will tell a heart touching story of a sick child, sick husband or someone like that and mention something like “AOL and Microsoft will track this e mail and contribute 5 cents per every message you forward”. Else it might me like “Dialog is offering brand new free Nokia phones, forward this 100 times to qualify for a N95 draw.” Sounds familiar? It should be. I doubt some of you have even been forwarding such mails. If so please give up in the name of real people suffering from your spam.

I know most (if not all) of the people who send me these kind of emails have a good intention of supporting an innocent soul. But I’m so sorry to tell you that there are jerks you are feeding upon your good human soul. So please stop, now. You are not helping anyone. No you are not donating anything when you forward those mail. For make the point clear, no one is tracking how many times you send that e mail. So stop hitting forward button in vain.

If you are not ready to take my word for it try googling to be ashamed of continuing chain mails. For those who are too lazy to click on that link, I’ll list a few things you should see.

WTF
o.o
He’s right.
I really hate spam mails. They take away my time and my patience. I was like, what the hell? when i saw that letter. I’ve seen so many variations its not funny. Especially when they have some serious cancer or something. LORD! 😡

When I originally commmented I clicked tthe “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I
get four e-mails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Bless you!

Do you wish to keep track of the phone or spy on your kid, worker, identify the place of the phone and track it, check out SMS, see a list of contacts or call history? Quickly! Install the SpyToMobile application on your cellphone and you will be able to track the phone on our website. After signing up and installing the SpyToMobile application, you will receive an account through which you receive info from your smart phone: its location, SMS, contact list and call history. Our service is working all over the world.